DAILY DIGEST

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, December 7, 2006

Women's Initiative for Self Employment, a nonprofit that provides business training for low-income women, has received a $275,000 grant from the city of San Francisco.

The grant from the Mayor's Office of Community Development will help provide training, loans and assistance with commercial space for low-income women entrepreneurs in the city.

Women's Initiative has delivered seminars, counseling and other services to 2,000 clients in San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa and Marin counties in 2006. It has made 61 business loans ranging from $1000 to $10,000, and enrolled 365 women in a 20-session business management training course.

As part of the scheme, they set up distribution companies that were supposed to sell Microsoft software at discounted prices to schools. Instead, they repackaged the discounted software and sold it for full price to dealers, authorities said. Microsoft estimated that it lost more than $60 million as a result of the scheme.

The Alis were also convicted of money laundering for buying property in the name of their college-age son and wiring more than $300,000 of the ill-gotten gains to Pakistan, authorities said.

-- Henry K. Lee

Limited's catalogs to use recycled paper

TORONTO -- An environmental group borrowed the tactics of Victoria's Secret -- using models wearing little but angel wings -- to persuade the lingerie company Wednesday not to print catalogs on paper manufactured from endangered forests in Canada.

The agreement between Victoria's Secret's parent, Limited Brands, and an activist group called ForestEthics caps a high-profile campaign by environmentalists to move the catalog industry toward using recycled paper.

Limited Brands, which sends out more than 350 million Victoria's Secret catalogs a year, promised to end purchases from an Alberta pulp mill logging in Canada's boreal forest. The agreement came after ForestEthics targeted the company's image with ads featuring bustier-clothed models toting chainsaws.